"Alhaji Bukar Ali hadn’t seen his family in close to a decade due to armed conflict. Then, a team of Red Cross volunteers in Cameroon and Nigeria helped not just to find his relatives but to reunite them. ... "When fighting reached my town, we joined many people to flee,” Alhaji says. “I found myself in neighbouring Cameroon, taken in by a local leader.”

Alhaji was just seven years old at the time. Now 16, the journey from separation to reunion would be a long one. ... It wasn’t until an International Committee of the Red Cross team in Cameroon noticed he was without family, and took on the case to try and find them, that things started to change. ...

“It took a long time,” says Lilian Dube from the ICRC team in Maiduguri. “You can imagine the information we received – there wasn’t much because Alhaji was still a very young boy when he was separated.” ... when the ICRC and Nigerian Red Cross used photo tracing techniques that someone recognised Alhaji and helped make the connection to another of his brothers, Modu Bongomi – living just outside Maiduguri. ... "I feel so happy – I’m just smiling continuously,” Alhaji tells us. Just moments after his plane landed, he had been able to embrace his surviving brother, sister and aunt for the first time since armed conflict had torn them apart."